return

Well. I'm back from my family-focused sojourn in WA, aka Washington The State. I suppose much has changed in the week while I was away. On the music front, I've acquired another huge chunk of (new) music. "New" finds itself in parentheses since a huge chunk of the huge chunk is actually music I have on tape, which I've handily captured in digital form, though not through digitization as such. Whew. In any case. At some point I'll get around to capturing my appraisals of my assortment of new albums. Meantime, I've reinstalled the mog-o-matic in a post-beta MOG world. The reasons for the reinstall are much too tedious to recount. And more importantly, in good part because of my last week (in airports, in hospitals, sleeping on floors, walking dreamily back to Job), I have been struck, or rather, have been stuck on the new Explosions In The Sky album, "All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone." The title per se seems to capture something of my mental state over the last while, as I've moved in and out of various family and old friend contacts. I've always had a small stash of Explosions, but I've never, really, been all that impressed: a mood or ambient music to which I've never given a second thought, a kind of pale shadow of, say, Godspeed You!Black Emperor. However, on this last album, I've somehow come around; or, I've heard the light. Where in the past I've heard shabby drum tech, on the current album I hear necessity. Where in the past I've heard background fuzz, on the current album I hear composition. I don't know how exactly to attribute the shift, but it's there all the same. "All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone" is extraordinary. In parts it's long. As a whole it's short. In parts it's simple. As a whole it's complex. As a kind of specimen of what the critics call "post rock," it has nothing to offer. Who cares? There is, though, something in the texture of this work that is absolutely seductive, and I'm not sure (as I say above) why I didn't hear it before, I mean, really hear it. So. Explosions In The Sky. Will I listen to this album again tonight as I'm drifting off to sleep? Yes.